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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview I-0068, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Richard Barentine arrived in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, certain that the modest city in the middle of the state held a great deal of potential. In this interview, he describes his effort to nurture that potential, first as a member of the city's Chamber of Commerce, and eventually as CEO of the International Home Furnishing Marketing Association. Barentine took the lead in transforming the Southern Furniture Exposition into the International Home Furnishings Market, a wholesale furniture event of international importance. For most of this interview, Barentine recalls his efforts to shape and expand "the Market," detailing his strategy as it unfolded over a period of years. He also describes his focused leadership style, which emphasizes communication, and reflects on the history of Winston-Salem and North Carolina's furniture trade, which is expanding its global reach. This interview will be useful to researchers interested in Winston-Salem's furniture industry and in business leadership.
Richard Barentine, CEO of the International Home Furnishing Marketing Association, describes his leadership style and his contributions to Winston-Salem's furniture industry.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is an interview on Thursday, January 28, 1999 with Mr. Richard Barentine who is the Chief Executive Officer of the International Home Furnishings Marketing Association in High Point, North Carolina. We are at his offices in High Point. My name is Joe Mosnier of the Southern Oral History Program. This interview is a part of the SOHP's new series North Carolina Business History. We are joined today by Dr. Dorothy Darr who is involved with the Center for the Study of the American South and the Oral History Program, a long time ally and colleague. Because it is the 28th of January, this is cassette number 1.28.99-RB. I thought Mr. Barentine we might start today with just a sketch of your personal background: where and when you were born, your family life, what you folks did, the community you lived in, early schooling.
I was born in Memphis in Tennessee in 1944 in February, so I am nearing my fifty-fifth birthday. I was educated in the public schools of Memphis. I received a Bachelor's degree from Memphis State University, which has renamed itself the University of Memphis. My degree is in history and political science, which shows that if from my generation you were educated in a broad based way, you could do a lot of things. I don't know if that holds true today in today's technological world, but it did in my world. I grew up in the wonderful, sort of sleepy, hazy '50s. [I] experienced the opposite in the '60s. [I] wouldn't have missed the opportunity to live through the '60s. I left Memphis three days after I graduated from college.
Which was which year?
1967. I came to North Carolina. I came to North Carolina to work for the United States Public Health Service. I worked for that agency for two years. I served a two-year term in the Public Health Service. At the end of that term—.
Let me ask. What were you doing and where?
Well, you know, I knew you were going to ask that. I was a federal venereal disease investigator. Having lived through the sleepy '50s and the turbulent '60s, that was a real shock for the grandson of a southern Baptist minister.
Was this a Great Society job?
I don't really think it was a Great Society job because the jobs are still in place today and were in place, I would suspect, from the end of the Second World War and maybe back before then. It was an interesting job. My mother never quite got up to speed on what I did for a living for those two years. When asked, she would just say, "He works for the Public Health Service." "Well what does he do?" "I don't know." She didn't know.
A young person coming out of college, did this look like a potential career path, or was this "I'm going to do some public service" in that era?
No, I got a draft deferment. Anyone who didn't live through the '60s
could be quick to criticize. We have heard the criticism of our public
officials who lived through the '60s. The Public Health Service of the
United States government was offering college graduates a draft
deferment to do this work. I came to North Carolina and worked in that
capacity for two years, which was the deal I had with the government, to
serve in the Public Health Service. Perhaps I would have gone on in the
Public Health Service, but they move you around too much. They wanted me
to go to New Mexico to
Let me ask you another question, too, before we move too much beyond the distance of this discussion of your early childhood. Can you describe the process, as you look back, of your values formation? Like most of us, parents were a principal influence?
I had a very stable childhood. My parents are both, at this point, still
alive in their eighties. I didn't experience divorce. I did experience
much death. I lost grandparents, but I had no siblings who died. I have
an older sister, a younger brother
What did the employment landscape look to you like in '69 when you were coming out of your Public Health Service job?
I was fascinated by Winston-Salem. I had moved from Memphis. Memphis in
the '60s had a million people. [It was] a very large metropolitan area.
It certainly had all the cultural and social and shopping opportunities
that cities of that size have. I moved to North Carolina [and went]
first to Raleigh — and didn't stay there very long —with the Public
Health Service. Then they moved me to Winston-Salem. I was absolutely
fascinated with Winston-Salem because it was a microcosm of a big city
only it was a small city. I started off a little frightened because the
opportunities for shopping were fewer. Then I realized the same things I
could get in Memphis, I can get here. That's not always true when you
move from a city of a million people to a city then of probably 135,000.
It was sort of a shock. I was fascinated by Winston-Salem. It's an
extremely sophisticated, very cultured city, and very wealthy city. I
was able to be befriended by and become a friend of James A. Gray. James
A. Gray, Jr. served as a mentor of mine for a number of years. Jim Gray
is descended from a very prominent
Really?
For a number of years. Winston had the kind of things I liked. It was forward thinking and I liked the Chamber of Commerce. A number of very fine business people contributed to my success. I felt very fortunate [about that]. [Despite] not being from there — being newly from North Carolina, from Tennessee — I felt accepted. I was fascinated by that city and my job.
Let me draw you out a little bit more on the networks of business leaders into which you were drawn in that role.
I have a degree in history. So, history—. There's a thread of it through
everything that I do. Winston-Salem was one of the most fascinating
towns because at the Chamber of Commerce you were able to sit at the arm
of the power structure. You weren't part of it, but you were there to
implement the wishes of the people who ran the town. Many of them were
kin to each other. You had to understand the dynamics, or you couldn't
survive. That served me well in the furniture industry, as well. I stick
to these sort of nepotistic industries. There was no lack of money to do
what we needed to do. If you needed a special project, either the
tobacco company or the bank would provide the funding. Winston-Salem was
very well placed in the state political arena. There was plenty of money
for projects. Those big businesses were perhaps paternalistic, but that
sure wasn't all bad because Winston excelled in the state. It had the
first Arts Council in the nation. It has a long history of doing things.
I was fascinated by it. I was fascinated by the genealogy. I was
fascinated by the Moravian heritage — an old, old heritage. All of that
played into the love of history that I have. It was wonderful to see
enlightened people getting something done. Politics was civilized. You
could see the
You've anticipated another question, which is the extent to which you had contact with that realm of leadership, which is expressly political in those years. Were you drawn into political circles, working with government officials to a great extent and so forth?
The Chamber of Commerce works with all levels. It's a business
organization, obviously, but business is there to use the government
services or influence government services. In the tourism sector, that's
what I did. I ran the Convention and Visitor's Bureau. We needed the
help of the city. The city owned the Convention Center, so there was a
built in partnership. Tax money had built that facility, so we were
charged with promoting the city to bring the conventions in. The federal
government had provided a variety of grants to help clear some land and
build some hotels and things. So, we were dealing with the federal
people. The mayor and the city manager — all of those people – we worked
with very closely because we were bringing visitors to the city who
needed to be served and protected. One of the things that we
accomplished, very early on, was great alliances with the state of North
Carolina. The state's Travel and Tourism Division, for whatever reason,
had paid most of their promotional attention to the mountains and to the
coast. This "heartland" is what they called where we are now — but it
was the Piedmont — sort of got left out. They would say, "Well, you
know, y'all are so strong, you don't need the promotion and it's not a
recognizable—. It's not mountains and ocean." We said, "We're what keeps
the mountains from falling in the ocean. You need to pay attention to
the middle of the state." We fostered that relationship and
A facility that I still have is the ability to work with the elected officials regardless of the party affiliation. I was very close to all the administrations since '69. I've known every governor since 1969 and have traveled with a number of the governors. I was on a plane with Republican Governor Holshouser, our first Republican governor since Reconstruction. We crossed the Canadian border in the air, and Governor Holshouser said, "We have a Democrat on the plane, and I think we'll just throw him off the plane." You would need to know Governor Holshouser, to know that he had a good since of humor.
He participated in our politics series, so yeah—.
I was the Democrat on the plane. That taught me a good lesson, too. Don't think that they don't know what your party affiliation is. They always do. To that point, in the late '60s — in '69 — the advice from my mentor was, "You're going to work for the Chamber of Commerce. You're going to work for a state that has not had a Republican governor since Reconstruction. You need to be a registered Democrat in the state of North Carolina." He explained to me that a registered Democrat in the state of North Carolina is a person who votes Democratic on the local and state level and Republican on the federal level.
Even back then, that was his perspective?
Even back then, yeah. " Jim," he said, "If you're going to be appointed
to boards and commissions on a local level or on a state level, you're
going to have to be a registered Democrat." Of course, that was true
until the Republicans came in, but there was an understanding even then
that, I mean, everybody can't be a Republican all of a sudden. All of us
who had been registered Democrats for all these years, had served the
What led you down the road to High Point in 1977?
I was comfortable at the Convention and Visitor's Bureau. We were at the
height of our influence. I was at the height of my influence in my
career there. No other city in the state came near to what we were
doing. In fact, we were running how-to sessions for Charlotte and
Asheville and Greensboro, and everybody else that wanted to do what we
were successfully doing. I told the executive vice president of the
Chamber one day that, "We really ought to charge for some of this. It's
wearing me out doing all these how-to's." He said, "No. This is kind of
a part of what you do. You share with the other communities around."
That was a good lesson for me to learn, too. We started an informal
organization, which now has become the North Carolina Association of
Convention and Visitor's Bureaus. I'm the founder of that organization
and served as its first president. I served as its president for
probably five or six years before we had any formal structure to it. I
didn't really want any formal structure, but we finally put some
structure to it. Well, I was at the height of my effectiveness and had
real high recognition around the Triad because of what Winston was
doing. I got a call from a man from the
Difficult to sort out this committee form of boss, if you will?
No. No, not really. I think you have to have real sharp instincts. I think you have to know how to treat all of those people. You have to understand that they're very competitive, but they're also probably kin to each other and they're also friends. When they come together, you don't get caught in the middle of that business competitiveness. In any career that deals with very powerful people in a group, you have to learn, more often as not, not to ask permission but to ask forgiveness if it doesn't work out. I have a broad mandate that I check every once in a while with them. None of this work is done by a committee. That's what they wanted, and that suits my style. They want to manufacture furniture, bring it down here, and show it to their dealers. They don't want to be bothered about when are they going to close bridges and what's going on when we get there.
Maybe we could turn to the history of the organization, which will bring the story up to the point—. I'm keenly interested in what you found when you drove down here to take that new job in '77. What were these problems that they wanted solved? Maybe you could reach back for a minute, if you think that's most convenient. Or, do you want to go another direction?
At some point — and this might be the best place to do it — I think we need to go all the way back to why this event's here and that would take us all the way back to the end of the American Civil War. So, let's do that and get us through that period of history and then get us to the World War Two era, which is the era that the organization and I both have served in.
Yep.
North Carolina has a very rich heritage of cabinet making. If you look
back at the history of the state and if you look all across the state
from the coast to the mountains, you find excellent examples of fine
cabinetry. In many instances it was copied from the pattern books of the
great European cabinetmakers. Then it had some vernacular adaptations,
and it became ours. You had the Swicegoods in Davidson County. You had
the Moravians in both Salem and Bethabara. You had Thomas Day in Caswell
County and then many others whose names are familiar in history, but
those are some significant ones. What they made provided the basis for
the skill. Why they made it was because we had the raw materials. We had
the wonderful Appalachian hardwood forests running through this area. We
still have it. At the end of the American Civil War, the railroad had
been destroyed. The north [to] south railroad [system] had been
destroyed. During Reconstruction — the early part of Reconstruction — it
was fully
Quail hunters?
Quail hunters — dove and quail. So, there was an easy mixture between the north and the south at that point of Reconstruction. People like Colonel Francis Fries from Winston-Salem — who was a major industrial entrepreneur — and others came through. With the support of other people, we can get a railroad built. They went to Mr. Bassett. They went to Mr. Burnhart. They went to Mr. Broyhill, [and to] the Finches in Thomasville and others who owned timber and who were sawmillers. They said, "We want the sawmill. We want you to sawmill the crossties to build this railroad." So, they did that. That was wonderful work. We had the raw materials. When the railroad was finished, then lumber started being shipped out of here as the principal cash crop. In the 1870s and '80s that was about all we were doing here. As a cash crop, it didn't take the southern entrepreneurs and the northern entrepreneurs long to figure out that we ought not to be shipping lumber. We ought to be shipping furniture. So, in about 1880 — almost simultaneously in other parts of North Carolina — mass produced furniture started being made. I believe this city dates it [to] about 1888 as the beginning [the year] of mass produced furniture. So, in the '80s, it must have been a wonderful time in the south, particularly in this part of the south because—.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Okay.
A large idle workforce was put to work. The quality of life — the
standard of living — immediately was ready to change because people had
jobs. There was a focus on the future. It was natural that we were doing
this because we had the basis for building the cabinetry. We had the
heritage of the handmade [furniture], and now we would do machine made
[furniture]. Well, we started off in that period of time making not the
finest furniture. What the southern manufacturers wanted to make was
furniture for everybody. We were scoffed [at] a little. Of course, we
were scoffed at by Jamestown and Grand Rapids and Chicago and New York
because we quit sending them the lumber. We, as upstarts, got into the
furniture manufacturing business. Who did we think we were? Well, we
actually knew who we were. We made furniture, and we shipped it north.
We put it in these nice wooden crates called cases. Unfortunately for
our furniture manufacturers, we didn't know this for a long time. The
people on the other end didn't really care about the furniture. They
wanted the cases because they had very fine lumber that they could then
make furniture out of. That's where the word case goods comes from. It's
wooden furniture. We learned quickly that we could build a finer
product. Most factories built a single piece of furniture. They built a
bed, and this factory would build a dresser. Through consolidation
people bought factories, and that's how we ended up with bedroom suites
in rooms. It was happenstance. Today many manufacturers of dining room
furniture don't make their chairs. They make the table, but they don't
make the chairs. So, there's still some of that going on. Here we were,
[in the]1880s, making all this furniture [that was] on a railroad that
was bringing northern
Because of perceived insufficient quality?
I think that was part of it. I think we had—.
The resentment?
There was probably a healing process that wasn't quite complete. We had,
after all, stopped shipping them lumber. Here we were competing, and I
could expect that the northerners felt towards the southerners what we
in the United States sometimes feel about exports from other countries.
This was stuff coming from virtually another country. They had never had
this kind of competition in the north. The people in the south didn't
really like the way they were being treated in the north. They realized
that they were getting started, but they needed a way to market this
product. There were several efforts in the late 1880s to bring buyers to
this area. They weren't very well organized. They were sort of civic,
sort of industrial, but not very well organized. They'd have them one
year, and then they wouldn't have them. It would depend on this railroad
traffic because in the 1880s, that's the only way you got down here.
People in the community and in the industry decided that we need to do
this a little differently. We know we have the product, and we know that
people want this product. We just need to get it into the mass
merchandising networks and not just carry this stuff around on wagons
and try to sell it. That's how a lot of it was done. It was done by
peddlers who just would come in and pick up the stuff. You can got to
museums today and see the
By 1913, the event was held twice a year, very successfully. Still, it
was being held in small buildings, mostly in the upstairs of existing
buildings in the uptown area. We don't know how many buyers came in
1909, but we do know in 1913 that the event used 30,000 square feet of
space. It had space in eight different buildings here in High Point and
Thomasville. There were a hundred furniture manufacturers, and four
hundred qualified buyers came to that event in 1913. So in the few
years, from 1909 to 1913, this
From 1913 on the Market began to grow rather dramatically. In the late '20s, a group of investors built the Southern Furniture Exposition Building, which still stands today as one of the core buildings of the International Home Furnishings Center. I guess that building was probably about nine stories, maybe ten, when it was built. It was a very solid expression of confidence in the industry and in the event. You know, by that time the event was pretty well established. The quality of the furniture had greatly improved. The number of manufacturers had consolidated. They still were mostly kin to each other. The event was theirs. It was a business event for the purpose of getting buyers to come to see this product. I had a conversation several weeks ago with the recently deceased Herman Bernard. Herman was one of our carriers of history. Herman had been in the furniture industry in this city for many, many years and would sit and tell stories about the Market and could remember when the Southern Furniture Exposition Buildings was built. He said, "You know, it was just this massive open core — no partitions, no walls, and no curtains. You just went in on the floor and everything was just there. You were standing right next to your competitor looking at what they made, and they were looking at what you made." He said, "Then we finally put some curtains up because it was getting a little too close for comfort. We put some walls up."
So the event has been one that has evolved. It has evolved at the same pace that this city has evolved. We've not outstretching its capacity. The event has been here so long, it is referred to as "Market" and that is a capital M. Nobody outside of this town misunderstands what you're talking about. You're going to Market. You're not going to the grocery store. It's with a capital M. That got the event well established. The buyers were coming down. They also didn't just come to High Point and Thomasville. They took these motor excursions and went to the factories in Lenoir and at Bassett. They were going around to those factories. First, they were going to buy closeouts. "What kind of deals you've got?" "Closeouts." "We're going to come down here." A lot of that was done in January and July — kind of look at that Florida schedule, too. How do we do business? Well, we do business sometimes because it's where we want to be. But then, as the Market grew, more and more exhibitors came down to Southern Furniture Exposition. That building from the late '20s to the '60s dominated the landscape without much competition from other real estate developments. There were a few. The '60s saw a great growth spurt in other kinds of showrooms.
During the First World War, everybody made war materials. We had a break
there during the First World War. [During] the Second World War, there
were no markets held. The whole industry was making war materials. The
Southern Furniture Exposition Building was a record office for personnel
records for the Armed Forces. All across the United States, the
government took over various buildings. This was a perfect building to
take over because it was empty. They stored personnel records there
throughout the Second World War, which also attests to the national
influence that this city had gained by that time. For people in
Washington to identify a building in High
At the end of the Second World War, as anyone who was born near it or reads their history knows, that there was this great burst in the economy. All of the veterans were coming back. I remember as a kid just hundreds of houses under construction at one time. Every other one was different. They had three or four plans. As a kid, we'd go to these vast subdivisions and go and look in all the—. we'd never seen that many houses being built because right before the Second World War, there weren't that many houses being built. All of a sudden, you had this huge demand for home furnishings. Many of the leaders of the industry had come back. It was a time that the generations were changing in the factories. Sons were moving into ownership. Not many daughters. A few. I'll touch on that, but not many. It was the times. But, a lot of change in management and some of those people were the people that I encountered in the '70s and that now are nearing their retirement. So, I worked through all that.
The Market was growing overwhelmingly. In 1955 the manufacturers decided
they needed to have a cohesive group. They founded an organization
called the Furniture Factories Marketing Association of the South. It
was the major case goods people. It was after all those people who had
invested the time, the money, the energy, and their reputations in
founding this market in 1909, so they wanted to see it continue. They
had a vested interest. They had a paternalistic interest. They were
going to control it. It served the industry and served them very well.
So that the focus never got diverted from
So the Market is here because of the raw material. It's here because of the heritage of cabinet making in North Carolina. It's here because the northern and the southern entrepreneurs joined together to make it be here. It's here because they want it here. North Carolina today produces thirty-five percent of the furniture made in the United States. Virginia produces twenty-five percent. So in a radius of about two hundred miles, from High Point and Thomasville, you'll find sixty percent of the furniture that's made in the nation being made. Point of production has always been where the market has taken place. When Grand Rapids was the manufacturing furniture capital of the world, the market was in Grand Rapids. The same thing [occurred] in Jamestown, Chicago, and New York. But [in] those cities, as we increased our influence, their influence declined. As theirs declined, we moved into the leading position. Very early — in the late '50s — we were the dominant market. Certainly by the early '70s, we were the largest home furnishings market in the world.
Even by the early '70s?
Yeah. When I got here in '77, we were the largest in the world. So [it
happened] sometime in that period of the '70s. I think it had to do with
that great
No staff? This was the manufacturers doing this?
No staff.
On sort of a rotating basis? You do it this time [and] I'll do it next time.
Um hmm. There were generally four officers. For a while, they would serve a year term. Then they realized that they were running out of each other, so they'd better have two-year terms. They weren't really about letting too many other people in. They gave themselves two-year terms and sort of held out for generational change to bring in new officers.
Do you know if during some of those early promotional materials exist?
I have a few, [but] not many. The box that they sent around, I guess it
would be thinned out by different officers. It had the legal records,
the minutes and things, but it didn't have very much of the promotional
materials because they farmed that out to an ad
The Hampton Powell phone call that came in '76? I want to make sure I'm clear on this.
How long had problems been stewing before they then decided "We need to go out and take some action"? Were those problems essentially just the problems of too much success?
I can't answer that because they weren't talking to us in Winston-Salem.
High Point was very parochial about this event and can be sometimes
today very parochial about it. It's theirs. We didn't know anything
about it in the Triad. We didn't exactly say, "Oh, Lord, who are all
these people?" We knew when Market was going to take place and it was a
good piece of business. You knew you were going to get full. But, we
didn't really know what kind of problems they were having. They weren't
telling us. These problems were accumulating. It was problems with
transportation. It was problems with accommodations [and] problems with
communications. This Market was stretched out across North Carolina for
150 miles. The interstate didn't even go all the way to Hickory in '77.
You had people come down here, and they didn't know where to fly. Then
they couldn't get a car. You had to have a car then. You had to move
back and forth in a car. The east wasn't talking to the west because
they were very competitive.
So the Market had perhaps depended a little on the manufacturers, and they had found a very strong advocate in Robert Gruenburg. Bob Gruenburg, the late Robert Gruenburg, was the head of the Southern Furniture Market Center for many years and was in that position of leadership in '77 when I was hired. He was one of my supporters, one of the people who advanced my name. He was tough. He was fair. He ran a very tight ship, and his influence was broader than just his building. Yet, he wasn't the right one to do the job. He was a landlord. There were these other buildings growing up. And he realized it. Bob and I had not an uneasy relationship, but it took Bob a while to relinquish spokesperson roles and things of that nature that he had done because it had sort of been left to him to do it. He picked up the responsibility. Manufacturers weren't angry about him, but they didn't want him doing it. They didn't want the landlords doing it.
I don't know how long they were sitting over here wringing their hands. I
don't know how long these problems were going on, but they were pretty
serious by the time they got to me. Yet, they were very simple to solve.
They simply needed day to day leadership — someone carrying the message
back and forth and some entity that actually communicated with all the
landlords, all the exhibitors, all the hotels, everybody that needed to
be a part of this event. My style, my mandate was "You do this. We want
you to straighten all this up." We talked about what was practical, what
wasn't practical and kind of set the mandate. The mandate came together
that we were to create and sustain a business climate where all of
Market's participants can have a profitable, a pleasant, and a
Now, the other day, Bob Spilman described my career as, "We told him to do all this. He's done it. Everything now runs real smoothly. "Now when we come down there," of course, he doesn't now, but, "When we come down there, he's who we can yell at if something goes wrong." That's Bob Spilman. The way to make all that happen was to bring forward my Convention and Visitor's Bureau career. This is just a bigger audience. They have to have a place to sleep. They need to move around. They need to eat, and all those things. We're going to push them into a box that's a private event. That's different. That's a little different because you're only promoting to a qualified group of people that can come. That's a little different. But, I had the visibility in the Triad to be able to work with all these communities. We had taught most of them what they were doing. We were not an adversary.
I did not live in High Point. I'm not from High Point. I have never lived in High Point. I don't live in High Point today. When I was hired, I remember I had this wonderful, deep fascination with Winston-Salem. Mr. Powell said, "You know we're going to hire you." I said, "Let me just ask you a couple of questions now. Does it mean I have to move twenty-five minutes away from where I live because—." I remember exactly how I did this. I asked the question. He said, "No. We'd really rather you didn't live in High Point."
That you did not.
[That I] did not live in High Point. I said, "Well, good. I wouldn't be interested in the job if I had to move twenty minutes from where I live now." In '77, Market took place in two places. It took place in Statesville, Hickory and Lenoir. And it took place here in High Point and Thomasville. In '77 immediately I used my Chamber of Commerce background. I came over to High Point to my friends at the Chamber of Commerce. They knew I was being hired. They were some of my supporters as well. I said, "There is no more logical place to have an office, then than in your building. There is no more logical service for you to provide the Market, than to give us our office." I went to Hickory to my friends in Hickory and said the same thing. So in early '77, I started a migratory office routine of three days in High Point and two days in Hickory. Now remember, we all travel when we want to, where we want to. My office hours in Hickory were Friday and Monday. Mr. Powell asked me one time, "Why do you go up there on Friday and Monday?" I said, "Mr. Powell, I have a house in Blowing Rock." He said, "Oh." I said, "You don't have to pay a hotel room. If you send me up there two consecutive nights, you have to put me up in a hotel." Then he thought that was wonderful. I was just really sleeping at home every night and just went to my office on Fridays and Mondays. I did that for eight years. I was there from '77 to '85, and I'm the person that kind of turned the light out and brought the flag down. We stayed one market longer than we really needed to to close down all those operations up there.
But again, it was that same kind of style of working with them and being
able to identify the public officials and leaders in the community and
making them understand how important the event was. Through the Chamber
of Commerce format, I found those
Now you had to have western partnerships and eastern partnerships. We pulled this event together and promoted it as one event. There was none of this east and west conflict anymore. It took someone carrying the message back and forth, three days [and] two days to make that happen. My schedules during Market during the '70s to '85 were absolutely horrendous. I remember the amount of driving I had to do. It was tough not to have a breakfast meeting in Hickory, a luncheon in High Point, an afternoon reception in Hickory and a dinner down here. It just was awful, but it was what it took to get it together.
The Market all that time is growing. Its problems are decreasing because they're being managed properly. They're also decreasing because the area is growing, so you're having more hotels built. That's all a result of being good stewards of the economy around here. The tourist industry was a big participant in building a lot of these hotels. As we managed the problems, they were solving themselves as we grew. Well, not always solved because they're always ready to have a problem, but they're managed.
Then the idea [arose] that the Market ought not to be separated as widely. People, who came to this Market, traveled it and worked it and liked it, but that generation was changing. The next generation hadn't remembered when you had to go to the factories all over. The new generation didn't care particularly that you could go have dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Burnhart. [They didn't care that] they'd take you home with them or Mr. and Mrs. Broyhill. That didn't mean anything to them. The early part of the southern manufacturing climate was [based on] personal relationships, a lot of that. It still is today, but it's a little different the way we do business today. The western part of the state was more relaxed. We had a million square of space up there. We had never more than four hundred exhibitors. In the '70s we had probably 1300 exhibitors. There were still parties at Mr. Burnhart's house. There were still parties at the Broyhill's. But, times were changing. The buyers weren't interested in making those long journeys. People were telling those people up there it was too far to go. "We can't go up there." They also were finding that they had about a two-day Market up there. Big dealers would come up there and stay a couple of days, and then they would come down here and they wouldn't see them again.
There was an emotionally wrenching decision that many of those manufacturers had to make. Did they give up these wonderful factory showrooms, that they owned, that were across the street from their offices? They always could sleep in their own bed at night during Market. Did they give those up to come down to High Point or Thomasville? Where strategically could they find themselves located? Location [was] important. Many of the manufacturers were stockholders in the infrastructure. They owned hotels. They owned portions of stock held buildings in Hickory. I don't remember exactly who precipitated it, but I think it was probably a number of decisions that happened very quickly when Broyhill announced they were leaving. The Lane Company closed all of its divisions up there, Century, then Burnhart.
This part of the Market — the eastern part of the Market — was fully aware of the thought process that was going on in the west because those big exhibitors were chatting with landlords and developers down here. Bob Gruenburg, brilliant businessman that he was, decided he would build the Design Center. It's not the last building that's been built in that complement, but it was built to accommodate this demand that was coming from the west. All of those western exhibitors didn't choose to go in that building. Market Square was being developed at the same time. Market Square was a little before its time.
We had all been to Ghirardelli. We all knew what an old factory could
look like if it were rehabilitated. We'd been to San Francisco, again,
because you travel where you want to go. We'd been to San Francisco, and
we'd seen how that can work. We didn't know that it could work here. The
visionaries that were going to make that work, hoped it would. In the
South, there weren't many of these factory redos. There were plenty of
factories that could be redone, but there hadn't been any major ones.
This city had no
[Was it] too big of a bite?
Yeah. Bob Gruenburg was over here, busy building the Design Center to
take the sting out of Market Square. These landlords are big
competitors. When Century signed as an anchor tenant for Market Square,
and Market Square had been open—. Century didn't come down here and open
with them. Century Furniture Company came down and said, "This will be
where our showroom will be." Century is as sophisticated, as design
conscious, as image conscious as any company you'll find. They're going
to go on the top floor of an old factory building [in which] the roof
leaks and all the water pipes and all the utilities are hanging up there
in the ceiling, and the floors squeak. It's not this House and Garden
sterile showroom environment they've had and that everybody else had.
That's when Market Square caught on. Now the owners may differ with that
perspective. When Century came, that's when—. If you talk to Jake, I
think Jake will agree that Century then put that stamp of credibility
[on Market Square]. "We can handle the environment. It's not the way
we've done business in the past. It's not the way this Market has done
business in the past. It's probably not the way the south had done
business in the past. But we're going to try it." They tapped in again
to that history that
I'm sorry. I don't understand those implications. [Tell me about] the Tax Act.
The federal government will give you tax credits — real tax dollar credits — if you will rehabilitate for adaptive use a National Register of Historic Places building. They have oversight through the state Historic Preservation Offices as to how its done, what has to be saved, how it's looked after, all those things. Then you get twenty percent.
Jake did it under twenty-five percent.
Twenty-five percent.
They got about a two and a half million dollar tax credit for an eleven million dollar project reducing the overall cost from eleven by two and a half million.
It's taken off the tax by the dollar.
Dollar by dollar. It's a federal income tax credit.
[It encourages] historic preservation. The reason there's historic preservation is because it's economically feasible to save the building and because there is a use. Now the building complexes have all just been sold to the Chicago Merchandise Mart. Isn't that ironic?
I'm sorry.
Isn't that ironic? You want to take a break?
Let's take a little break. [break]
In the consolidation of Market from west to east, it is very important that it be noted that the move from Hickory and Lenoir was not based on anything those communities did wrong. They had served this event well, but at a point, the distance between the west and the east was no longer the way the event could do business. Those people for whom the event is held — the manufacturers and the buyers — made the decision that the Market would no longer be held in the west. Almost immediately, at the end of 1985, no wholesale showrooms were located outside the immediate High Point-Thomasville area. There were some in Lexington. There is one in Asheboro. But when it closed in Hickory-Lenoir, it closed. All the big energy came down here. There was a million square feet of space built for that transition, and almost immediately another million square feet was constructed in the 1986-87 era. We found ourselves consolidated. The record keeping that I inherited in '77 — because of the sort of the looseness of the Association and the relationships — wasn't very good. The real statistics that this Market works from—. We work from the 1913 statistics that we can document. Then we benchmark '77 as the year, remembering that the event is a private function. It wasn't seen as a major North Carolina event — a major Triad event. They didn't keep big attendance figures. They just said, "Yeah it was good. We had a lot of people here." Nobody was benchmarking—.
Well, it sounds like they didn't really have the apparatus to do that sort of statistics accumulation.
Yeah. [They] didn't have it. They had gotten pretty much into the hyping
business. Whatever figure—. It was astonishing, some of the figures. I
once told a very credible participant in this Market that, "If you're
not careful, every man, woman and
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
This is the second cassette in the Thursday, January 28, 1999 interview with Mr. Richard Barentine in High Point North Carolina. This is cassette 1.28.99-RB.2 for the Southern Oral History Program's series North Carolina Business History. We are continuing our general discussion on the Furniture Market and the evolution of the Association in High Point. We are here with — in addition to myself, Joe Mosnier of the Southern Oral History Program — Dr. Dorothy Darr of the Center for the Study of the American South and a colleague and ally with the Southern Oral History Program. Let me have you recapitulate a touch because we might have missed a little bit right at the end of that cassette.
Any event has to have a body of statistics. You have to be able to define the event. It's the way everybody does business. Well, until 1977 because it was a private event, they didn't have a lot of external communication. It was all pretty much internal. In '77 one of the jobs I had to do was [to] benchmark some figures, so that we could move forward. We benchmarked 35,000 attendees at the Market and because the event needs to be seen in its largest terms — not cut up into little pieces — we don't separate out buyers and things like that. It was 35,000 people and we had a 1000 international people in 1977 from thirty countries. That's an extraordinary number of international people coming to the interior of North Carolina for an industry event — a private event.
[That was] more than twenty years ago.
[Yes,] more than twenty years ago. We had 1,300 exhibitors. We were
using ninety buildings at that point. The Market had grown so
dramatically after the Second World War — particularly in the '60s and
early '70s — that we were actually using
Let me jump in with a quick question [about] he issue of your working relationships with manufacturers. Let's pick the time when the name had changed to illustrate the character of those relationships. Can you talk a little bit about what sorts of steps were necessary to bring everybody over to the decision to make the name change?
Well, as we've discussed earlier, the Furniture Factories Marketing
Association was a close knit group of southern case good manufacturers
who could make these decisions along family lines and along industry
lines. We weren't talking about a lot of people. They were like
thinkers. They knew the importance of the event. They understood what
noblisse oblige means. They'd put up the money. They had hired the
staff. They were running the world's largest home furnishings market as
an organization, but not asking everyone to participate in that cost.
Certainly they were not giving everyone a decision. So it didn't take
long. It was not a hard sell. It was an evolution. We were going to be
the leader. We needed to name the Market. We owned the name of the
Market. We owned the other name. It was by consensus, not by conflict,
that they put this name change in place. It just happened quickly. We
made the decision. We picked the name. We changed promotions. We changed
everything we did to the new name. We have a few references to the old
name, just as history. We, at the same time, changed the name of the
marketing association to the International Home Furnishings Marketing
Association. We probably should have reflected a little more carefully
on that name. It probably should be the International Home Furnishings
Market Association. Sometimes we get calls that are of a marketing
nature, but we only do this event. Maybe some day, that might be
changed. We own the worldwide trademark to the new name of the Market.
It's important to the sponsor on that. We name it. We nurture it. We set
its dates. Consensus was always easy to get on well thought out
projects. My style has always been that I am not one of them. I work for
them. Major decisions like that come from the leadership. I am here to
implement their mandate. I didn't change this market's
I'd like to make sure we get a good sense, in some good detail, of the actual detail of the work that you did. How you spent your time. If we're focussing on this period — sort of post-'89 – [and its] tremendous growth, new challenges, internationalization, technology, the need to be certain that the infrastructure that supports the Market keeps up with the rate of growth, [I'd be] interested to have you talk about those things. Also, talk about any changes that you've seen in the size of the group that directs the Association [and] the nature of the membership perhaps, if it's essentially you see continuity without much change around the edges. Or perhaps there are some new types of faces who are participating? I don't know.
Our mandate separates our responsibility into four main categories of
activity. I think to answer those questions, I'm going to answer them
kind of separately. Let's look at those. They are promotion,
coordination, communication and administration. When you look at those
four as a body of responsibility, then you must also look at those as
having an internal audience that's within the home furnishings industry
and this event. Then a vast external audience of these partners we have
in the hospitality industry, in government, in local community
organizations and those things. If I look back to 1977, that's where
their problems were. They hadn't identified those four categories. They
weren't communicating both internally to all of the players, and they
certainly weren't communicating to the external audience. If we kind of
take those, we'll just take them one at a time. The sponsor defines the
event. The manufacturers are the owners of the event. It's here on
behalf of their buyers. You need to promote the
We have to have access to accommodations. We pioneered the use of WATTS
line services. The Chamber of Commerce here in High Point has run a
private home housing service for nobody knows how long. Just forever.
Probably, for fifty years. It wasn't modernized. It wasn't mechanized.
It was still kind of hometown. It was done on index cards. We wanted, in
this effort, to tie the east and the west together to give people access
to accommodations, so we instituted — with the help of the Furniture
Market Development committee, which is one of our partners — putting
those WATTs lines
Critical to the success of the partnership style of business is your ability identify the concern. That's not always a problem, but it can be a concern. Then finding the logical agency to do that project, to pay for that project, and [to] convince them that it's their responsibility. That goes back to what I said about the manufacturers – [they they] didn't want simply to come in here and throw all the money that it would take to shellac these problems. They actually wanted these people to buy in. That's where we are in partnerships and that's how we use an external/internal audience. We will mail about 39,000 of these Friday.
Just for the tape, you're holding up the major new Market promotional.
We have a very precise schedule [with] repetitive behavior every six
months. April Markets are promoted beginning the first of February.
October Markets are promoted beginning the first of August. We all know
when our deadlines are. All of this material is going to a vast external
audience, as well with a letter that is called a Market
When did you first have to do that? Do you remember?
We started with three languages in about 1979. We've always used our
government partners to help us determine which languages we should use.
We've used the US Department of Commerce, and we've used the North
Carolina Department of Commerce. I suspect those first three languages
were Italian, Spanish, and probably German. Now we're up to—. Let's see
if we can name eleven: English, French, German,
Coordination is one of the most important of the four mandate points.
Promotion, coordination, communication, administration. There isn't
anything that happens in the Market area—. Again, we're not going to the
grocery store, we're going to the capital M Market. We need to know what
road construction is going to take place in the Greater Triad area. We
need to know if airports are going to be having additional or fewer
When bridges need to be closed, they don't need to be closed during
Market. We are on the corporate calendars across North Carolina alerting
these people across the state and the nation and the industries when
this event's going to take place. You asked me earlier [about] 2020.
That's a long way out. We're the largest event in North Carolina, so we
are the largest in the Triad. We don't need to share the infrastructure
with events that can have their dates whenever they choose. [Here is] a
wonderful example of how this partnership works. A number of years ago,
RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company was ready to
We have taught the federal government, the state government, and the
railroads that you can replace railroad overpass bridges in this city.
Now we need to say that the importance of the railroad is why this city
has its name High Point. It was the highest point on a stretch of the
railroad. It ran through on a north-south access for many years, grade
level. Then at some point, the city fathers and the community decided, I
guess, that they'd stopped for all the trains they were going to stop
for. They dug a below grade ditch, which the Darr's see because their
wonderful historic house is at the beginning of the railroad's decline
into the ditch. There's just bridges all through the town. They were in
bad shape and had to be replaced and what do we do? They are the
principal areas that we do business. We live through a couple of them,
and we managed to move around.
It's the power of the coordination. Everything from fire, traffic, the removal of litter, the removal of recyclable cardboard — hundreds of tons during a Market not going into the landfill – [and] bus transportation. Everything that you can think of that's important to making this event a work, we carry on our shoulders during this event. It's all here. It's a big engine. It's humming. We can hear it and we know it's there. We know when the hum gets louder that we're getting close to pre-Market, which is a month before Market. Then we're close to Market. We carry the weight of all of that. So, part of the Marketing Association's job is to be involved directly in decisions that impact the event.
The coordination depends on a shared vision that we have with the cities.
The shared vision that this event is a business event. These people are
all dressed up. They're here on business. This is not a carnival
atmosphere. It is not a convention that has
Can you illustrate, please?
Street food sales. We don't want entrepreneurial street food sales. We don't want entrepreneurial retail sales — people who show up in panel trucks and sell neckties. We don't want that. We do not want recreational vehicles to take up our courtesy parking spaces and use them as overnight accommodations. We had six of them at the last Market. A smart crowd comes to Market. They figure out—. It's just kind of hard to stay ahead of them. We [don't want] mobile showrooms. Market is a combination of a hundred and sixty buildings. The product is in leased space or owned space. We don't want someone coming through town pulling a trailer with iron gates. That [happened at] the last one that came through. They're getting around the system. There's no disciplining it. There's no revenue stream coming into this community because of that. So [we have to deal with] those things.
We only appear before city councils when laws have to be enacted or
changed. We always work with the elected officials, with the staffs to
make this shared vision take place. Rarely are we in the public forum. I
believe in Jeffersonian democracy. I believe that democracy is best
handled by a few enlightened people. The way we handle this event, is we
have a shared vision. We don't have a big debate. [There are] no big
Coordination also now includes safety. North Carolina, like any other area, has safety concerns. We are in the central business district. We are the principal tenants of the central business district. These are great, huge, tall buildings — most of which don't have windows. We're very concerned with lighting. If you fly over this city at night, with our city partner, all of the lightbulbs in the central business district — and that's the Market area — now are [lit by] those high sodium peach colored [bulbs that] spread the light out. [This is] probably the best lit city in the state. It's so [well lit] that when we're here doing business [at night], there are no dark spots.
You want folks to move around very comfortably.
No. We don't want to be the victim of opportunistic crime. We don't want to learn how Florida got German tourists to come back. If we have any serious crime at this Market, it can affect our attendance. It can change our reputation, just like that. So, we meet. We have police officers assigned to us at Market. We are listening to the way they direct the tactical plan for this Market. We have officers on the buildings that are armed [and have] radios. We have foot patrol, bicycle patrol, dog patrol, motorcycle patrol, plain clothed officers and uniformed [officers] everywhere, so that we have a safe environment.
The coordination spreads not only into Greater High Point, but it goes
over to Greensboro, because people are moving back and forth. They are
staying in 15,000 hotel rooms from Burlington to Clemmons – from
Burlington west to Clemmons, which takes
I told you earlier that prior to 1977 I'd never been to Market and I ran
the state's largest Convention and Visitor's Bureau that provided, at
that time, the principal number of rooms for this event. To make sure
the partners understand what we're asking them to do, every Market we
have a partnership luncheon every day. We will have up to twelve of our
partners come over for lunch. We divide it generally by a category,
either Winston—. I find that they way partnerships work is you let your
partner identify the power structure. I'll use Winston as an example.
The Winston-Salem Convention and Visitor's Bureau is in charge of
tourism in that city. We are their principal customer because we're
bringing this big event to Triad North Carolina and it's in Winston as
well. We will have a day where the Winston-Salem Convention and
Visitor's Bureau selects eleven or so people. We see mayors, chairs of
county commissioners, chairs of tourism
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
This is side B of the second cassette in the Richard Barentine interview, January 28, 1999.
We take our guests on a brief tour of the Market, to one showroom, and we walk them through some of the temporary space. It's access to the Magic Kingdom that those people won't get otherwise. It's in a comfortable environment because they don't know how to get around the event. We take them through. It's a leisurely walk on a set route. We know exactly what we want to show them. We walk from our offices to Market Square. We have several routes we could take. Because we coordinate everything, we rarely have a rain date that we have to encounter, but it humbles us when we do. But, we know how to manage that. We have these eleven or twelve people all of the principal days at Market. We're bringing one hundred to a hundred and ten, fifteen people into the Market. They then understand the importance of the partnership. They are flattered that they have been asked. We've let our partner invite them on our behalf. That makes our partner important in their local communities eyes because they have that discretion as to who they're going to bring. We've had the opportunity to have in a closed room [and] to talk to them about their participation in our event as a city or whatever agency we're dealing with. Then we take them on a tour. It's a multiplier effect.
We do that every Market. We have Winston; we have Thomasville; we have
Greensboro. We have all the sheriffs. We have all the fire chiefs. We
just have a long list. We ask our partners, "We'd like for you to bring
a group." We put together ten or eleven. We're finding now that it's to
our advantage some days to mix two partners and have them bring five or
six and five or six. Then we can have a dialogue between two
Administration—. We have all the legal terms that you need to run a North
Carolina corporation. We are a non-profit organization. We own the
worldwide trademark of the name. We are the structured sponsor of the
Market and not just a philosophical sponsor as we probably started out
being. All of that legal structure has been added since 1977. Obviously,
we've changed the name, so we've had to change some of that. We have
seen the membership of the marketing association increase over the years
because the industry has changed. There was still an interest that the
group be kept small, so that it could make policy decisions. The
Marketing Association members were never going to make a decision that
was going to harm the event. They were the principal players. All the
smaller players were the beneficiaries of noblisse oblige. We understood
that you can't make decisions in large groups and then be satisfied with
the
We then realized that it was time for us to look at the possibility of a merger with the American Furniture Manufacturer's Association. The American Furniture Manufacturer's Association is the successor to the Southern Furniture Manufacturer's Association. That same group of people that founded the Southern Furniture Market founded the Furniture Factories Marketing Association. It's all the same group of people. We shared most of the same leadership members. We tried to be careful that we didn't have the same president at the same time, though we did a couple of times. It was okay, but it was too much work to ask somebody to do. But, I had made a career decision early in my life that age fifty-five, I would retire. It didn't matter if I was having a good time. I would retire. In February of 1999, I will be fifty-five years old. My plans for retirement have been in place for a long time. The officers of the Marketing Association have known about my intent to retire for more than five years — possibly longer than that. The goal was to let the Market know that I was going to be leaving, so that all that we had accomplished together could have a long transition and that any changes that those leaders felt should be made, we could plan for.
As we got closer, we then started looking at the feasibility of merging with the American Furniture Manufacturer's Association. We bring a large volume of extremely valuable intellectual property to the table. We own the name of this event. We bring in our by-laws the ability to have members from all over the world. The American Furniture Manufacturer's Association is limited to America, not Canada, not Mexico—
The States.
Just the States. We bring the ability to have members from accessories, lighting, bedding and rugs. They can only have furniture manufacturers. What we're looking at is two industry groups. One [is] the industry trade association [which is a] broad umbrella that deals with them on all of those things. It also deals with the sponsor of their market and deals only with their Market and bringing those together in a wholly owned subsidiary situation where we stand alone. An example would be La-Z-Boy owns Kincaid, but Kincaid operates as an independent company. AFMA on January 1st of '99, owns the Marketing Association. We're a stand alone, wholly owned subsidiary. We own our own intellectual property, and we conduct business as we have in the past. It is not necessarily because I'm retiring, but it is certainly a good time to make those kind of decisions.
I'm sorry what was the effective date?
January 1st of '99, it is effective. It has been my style to leave at the peak of my influence. I left Winston. I'm very much in control of my life. So, at age fifty-five, the transition is in place. My successor was named six months ago. Nancy High will succeed me. She is now our executive director, a title we created so she could have a title. The letter that's with the poster has all of the new board [members] and her name. On July 31, I will retire. She will immediately become the chief executive officer. She will be, as I am now, a corporate vice president of the American Furniture Manufacturer's Association and chief executive officer of the Marketing Association. She will also carry those two titles when I retire. So, that answers your question about how our complexion has changed the number of people we represent.
Remember that noblisse oblige, on the part of the people who started this Market and who sustained it and controlled it, has always been that it is for the greater good of all who participate at the event. Our non-profit IRS status—. We are probably a perfect model for a non-profit organization because in all of our promotion, you don't see the names of the members. You see the names of our officers and boards. [During] our previous life before AFMA, we had all of our members down the side of the corporate stationary. That's the only place you see it. We have always taken the high road. [We've] seen [the Market] in the big picture and promoted for the greater good. The merger is a comfortable relationship. It's important that it's being done while I'm here so that people who can't write our job description, don't write it. I had a wonderful conversation with my friend and former boss and mentor, Bob Spilman, the other day. He's retired from Bassett now. He said, " I Thought you'd retired." "No sir. I'm not retired until July 31st." "Why'd you announce it so early?" "I announced it so early so that when I leave, they can't say "Did they finally fire him or did he leave on his own?" He said, "You know, you don't miss a thing do you?" "No I don't."
Let me asked you to reach back for some real simple information. What is your recollection of the operating budget to do the work you had to do in '77? How [did] that number moved up through [to] the present? I'm trying to get a handle on, frankly, how you managed to get all this work done. I still don't quite myself have a good feel for, or just even handling [of], for example, one of these mailings. How do you pull that off and how much money is involved?
The first budget in '77, as I recall, was $50,000.
Do your members contribute in proportion to revenues or something?
The manufacturing members [contribute] on a dues basis [based] on sales volume. The real estate developments — only the principal multi-tenant buildings — [contribute based] on square footage. We then have gone back to our partners who get the room tax — Burlington, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Thomasville, High Point. [We have gone back] to their grants program and said, "Okay. Anything bigger in your town than us? We need some help. Don't think that just because we are so big, you don't need to invest in our success." So, we receive a number of grants. Our budget for '98 — just finished '98 — was probably around $275,000, which isn't anything. It is not a big budget. I am influenced by Depression era parents. I came through the time at the Chamber of Commerce in Winston-Salem before room tax where we had to be terribly creative. We had to make every bit of the little bit of money we could get our hands on do the job. That's what they wanted when they hired me here at Market. We certainly look like a much larger organization than we are. We certainly have a printed image, a body of work, that is far exceeds what you would think a small staff could generate. It is because I can do these things. These poster promotions fall out of my head. They fall out of my head when I'm riding some place. These are easy for me to do.
Let me just say for the tape, we're in the boardroom where the posters covering many years of the Association's work are on the walls.
Because of partnerships, we can pull from our partners the visual images
that we need to promote this event. Being in a box, you know you're
going to promote to a certain crowd, but you also know you can't use the
products that are currently shown at the Market. Knowing that, you just
go beyond that. I will admit that some of them are a little more
sophisticated than some of the people who get them. Some of them aren't
well
I've got to ask you another question. Did I cut you off on what you'd like to add? I'm very much interested in learning about—. Think back across this span of time now and trace out the most interesting parts of the story of how more and more parts of the world are a part of this experience here at Market.
Well, as we mentioned earlier, in '77 we had a thousand international visitors from 30 countries. If we look back, the majority of those people would've been from Canada. Still, [we had] thirty countries. Last year we had 10,300, I believe, international people from 105 nations of the worlds — 192 nations.
I note that from the '87 to '97 figures, it's not quite half but it's
almost half the growth in the last decade of attendance. I guess [that]
suggests that you pretty much had
That's where they're coming from. It's coming from our trading partners. The furniture is produced in ninety of the one hundred counties in North Carolina. That statistic comes to us from North Carolina State [University] – [from] their furniture manufacturing curriculum, [headed by] Dr. Tom Culbreth. I didn't realize that we had so much furniture manufactured in the state. Because of that, we've been able to attract so many people. The growth in international—. We've branched out our partnerships to include the North Carolina Department of Commerce. Most of the colleges and universities now have some sort of international something that we're involved in. We've asked our government partners to get busy on our behalf. All of our eleven language brochures are in all of the embassies of the United States. All of our information is in the offices of the state of North Carolina in Dubai, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mexico City, and Toronto. The North Carolina Furniture Export office is located here. It's a branch of state government. It's because of Market's influence and the furniture industry's influence in the ninety counties, that the state has [been] identified.
I met yesterday with the new director of the international division. We
talked about this as a win-win for us and for government. We're going to
have this event. We're going to have 105 nations here. We're going to
have 10,000 plus people from outside the country. What you need to do,
is you need to have the managers of the offices soliciting qualified
attendants, bringing groups over, [and] answering questions about the
event. Anywhere there's a furniture fair in the world — Cologne, Tokyo,
Guadalajara, Milan — you ought to have a pavilion there spotlighting
furniture made from the United States.
We had the foundation because we had partnerships with the state government and with the US Department of Commerce. We have had cooperative projects since '77 with those branches of government. Again, I brought that with me from my background because I already knew what those people did. We provide the air tickets for the managers of the offices of the state of North Carolina to come to this market every six months. We earn certificates good for travel because of the airline discount program we have. As our partner, we have told the North Carolina Department of Commerce [that] we'll bring the managers of all those officers to this event. We want them here not later than Wednesday, before it opens, and they cannot go home before [the] Wednesday of the next week. We want them here working. We want them to bring people. We want to be able to tell people from Argentina that there is a trade specialist from the state of North Carolina that's here that covers Argentina. Here's where you find them. Or, that that person has already been contacted by a group of buyers and they've said, "We're going to North Carolina. I'm going to be there. I'll meet you. In fact, tell me what kind of product you want and we'll set your appointments for you." So, we've taken the sting out of the long trip and taken the mystery out. That works very well.
We will continue to grow [internationally, but the Market's backbone is
its domestic attendants. Take 10,300 out of 71 and you've got the
majority of the people coming to this event are from the United States.
This Market's promotion continues a trend of domestic promotion as well
as international promotion. We know who's
With our partners in North Carolina having six or seven offices, they're our offices. Those people work for us. We fly them over here. We fly them in the big seats, too. You know they're rested when they get here. They know they're going to fly first class when they go back. The state doesn't fly them first class, but we do. They work hard while they're here, and it's an easy win because we've got the audience. We've got the product. We've got the event. All they have to do is kind of work a little. Makes them look real good. The embassies around the world are hungry for this information, and the fact that it's in eleven language thrills the people in the world that they can pick up a brochure and be greeted in their language. Not [just] "hello," but a description of the event in five or six sentences. Then we switch to English, because English is the language of business in the world.
We're going to grow internationally. We're going to continue to grow domestically. Our categories continue to add strength. [We have] more rugs, more bedding, more lighting, and more accessories. Case goods and upholstery are still the backbone of the Market. That's what started it. That's what carries it. I'm always asked, "Is the Market going to go away?" This Market is not going anywhere else as an event in the world. We're larger than the next four largest markets — Cologne, Tokyo, Milan and Guadalajara. All combined, we're larger than those. There is no venue in the world that can hold this market. We use 160 buildings. What can happen to the Market is that it can no longer fill all of the needs that justify its expense.
Market has a tremendous number of functions. It's product presentation.
It is staff training. All of the sales representatives have to come to
this market so they get sales training every six months. It's sales and
promotion. It's photography. After the showrooms close, the photography
studios sweep in and start photographing the product and take it to
their photography studios, maybe, and photograph all night so that the
catalogue pages, the slicks, the covers for magazines are all there.
It's a time when 600 editors come to Market and work on editorial
coverage. It's not by coincidence that you pick up a magazine and
somebody's new line of furniture is being talked about. That's a lot of
that work's done here at Market. The photography on the covers and on
the insides of many of the magazines, that photography is taken in these
showrooms. It's important to note that the showrooms are fully
accessorized. Every detail [is included]. It's like the most beautiful
room you would ever want to live in. Depending on the price of the
furniture, the presentations change. The value added has to allow for
the elaborateness of the presentation. It's not just stacked up. It's
just gorgeous. It's circuitous, so you'll slow
Now, [here's] another example of a function at Market that you wouldn't even think about. Market's stature made the locating of the major industry trade associations into this area imperative. Now all the trade associations that serve this industry in a principal way — sales representatives, manufacturing, interior design, furniture designers, retailers — they're all located here. Twice a year their members and officers are at this event, so they can maximize that experience and have small meetings. [This is] not their fun meeting, where they go off to Bermuda or some place. [These are] business meetings, board meetings, executive committee meetings, seminars. That can all be done here, so retailers are thinking, "I'm a member of the National Home Furnishings Association, so I'll go to Las Vegas, but we can do this in April. We can do the seminar. I'm going to be there anyway." We have helped to create the root system. The cities, particularly High Point and Thomasville—. The cities and the county economic development entities very much want us as a partner because they want us to help them identify the next corporate headquarters that can locate here. They don't have to be in High Point. Sealy just came down from Cleveland, Ohio to Randolph County. Klaussner is in Asheboro. If we can get a number of corporate headquarters located here, then there is no more important place in the furniture industry than North Carolina. Their corporate headquarters is here. Their Market showroom is here. Their manufacturing can be any place in the world they want it to be. That [is what] we think is going to make Market remain strong. It's all up to the manufacturers and the buyers.
Are we challenged by electronics? Are we challenged by new technology? I would suspect in 1909 we were challenged by technology. We certainly have adopted and adapted to telephones and airplanes and everything that has come along. The new technology is just a new way for us to do business, but maybe not a thereat. We don't see it as a threat. We've embraced the technology. The industry itself is often not on the cutting edge of technology. A lot of companies still are not operating with email and websites. It'll come along, but the whole world is not on the cutting edge. I think that they'll celebrate their hundredth anniversary, and then I think they'll have to set some more dates because they've just got them set through 2020.
Let me take note of the fact, of course as you've mentioned, the Southern Furniture Market name gave way in '89. That seems [like] an extra reminder to ask a question that I'd like to pose. You've been here a good long span of time. You're a native of Memphis. What's your sense of the persistence or not of a regional distinctiveness, here in North Carolina in a business sense — in a business environment?
I think that last week's US News and World Report had an article on the
resurgence of regional excellence. I think that we probably moved away
from seeing ourselves as so different from other regions of the nation.
Actually, all we do is speak the language a little differently. We don't
really necessarily think in business terms that differently. I think the
Market with 2400 exhibitors from around the world is a very diverse
group, but they're all business people. We have some different people,
so we have some different kind of accents. I don't think we see
ourselves regionally any more. It's kind of hard to be the largest in
the world and think regionally. I will agree that the old name
regionalized us. We needed to change it. I don't think that as much
global
But you think it probably won't matter so much to Nancy High or Nancy High's successor at some long point down the road?
No. We've really don't think of it. I'm trying to think of some of the principles. Well, here's the best example: Merchandise Mart Properties of Chicago, a diverse group of entrepreneurs purchasing a million plus square feet of the Market's eight million. Ownership is no longer local in this Market. The International Home Furnishing Center is a stock held corporation owned by Bassett, Lane, Jefferson Standard and some other principal stockowners. They bring diversity to it. They bring industry ownership. Other buildings are not owned locally. I think that raises the event away from thinking of itself as local. It will never take away the parochial feeling that the community must have. It must have it. If it ever does away with its part of the ownership, we can't survive because we're bringing seventy-one plus thousand into a city of 77,000. We increase the size of the city. We double it twice a year. We do it with great ease, great charm and great dignity because we do it every six months. We do it with these communities as well.
There's one thing we haven't said about my life. I would be remiss if I
didn't say that I have had the opportunity to own one of North
Carolina's significant historic homes.
I want to really thank you for devoting so much of your time and your attention to this, so we could get such a fine and serious contribution to the archives. Thank you.
For those who will hear this in the future, those of us who are here have had a good life. North Carolina has been good to us. This Market has been good. It has no hidden agenda. It is a good news story. You may think that we stumbled, but we held onto a long tradition that the event, being ninety years old, has. If you listen to this and the event's still here, it will only have survived if you held onto the same traditions.
Any last thoughts, Dorothy?
I think building upon assets, like you were talking about. Thank you so much. It's been a fascinating story. I've enjoyed listening to it.
Thank you.
END OF INTERVIEW